What is your approach to managing poor performers on your team?

"A recruiter reached out to me early in the year, gave me good prep material, and Google skipped the usual screen based on my resume, which already felt different. The loop itself was split into two remote rounds and then three in-person rounds, so it was a real five-interview final rather than the usual single onsite block I expected. What stood out most was that they were not only testing EM skills. They were looking for googliness, broader general competencies, and what I kept thinking of as cognitive skill, especially in how deep they pushed on system design. I felt both system design interviewers wanted me to go past the usual black-box architecture answers and explain how I would actually implement the core logic. I ended up failing the must-pass coding round, which was a very unusual code review and debugging exercise, and the recruiter told me I would need to wait 12 months before interviewing again."

"I applied and they called me the next day, which was faster than anything else I have seen. The process was a recruiter screen, a 55 minute phone screen, and then a five-interview final loop with no take-home, all done remotely even though the role was SF-based. The most unusual parts were that the recruiter gave me actual feedback between rounds and that the EM system design was really a critique of a prebuilt Anthropic-style inference design, not a blank-sheet design. Across the whole loop, they cared a lot more about my resume, project decisions, management style, and culture than coding or AI trivia. I ended up getting rejected, and the written feedback was that my people-management round did not show the depth they were looking for."